Stories and Place

I came across a couple of great quotes the other day from a book I've read a number of times, but lost somewhere in my travels. The book is called “The Pound Era” by a certain Hugh Kenner and is a work of literary criticism focussed on the modernist writers Pound, Lewis, Eliot and Joyce. “That people live in stories that structure their lives”, and that “they contain the stories people tell themselves.”.

The closer the story one tells oneself comes to how one “is” at root, the closer one is to one's appropriate place. By place here I mean it in Aristotle's sense, as the goal of movement, and also in the topological sense that Heidegger uses it ( Topos = Place). As we move in and out of subcultures our personality, the effulgence of the stories we tell ourselves, morphs topologically as we feel more or less “in place”, more or less appropriate.

Is M/s a fiction then, a story emmie and mitda and I tell ourselves? Yes, but no more so than any other lifestyle that others engage in, whether their fiction is to be a politician or a cop or a mother. It is in finding the appropriate place that we appropriate each other and come to share a World.